International Spaceflight Museum Will Return to SL, But Will Need More Funding to Stay in SL

Good news: The International Spaceflight Museum, which left SL due to unpaid tier and failure to get non-profit status from the IRS, will return to SL fairly soon. That thanks to a last-minute donor, ISM volunteer Katherine Prawl reports. "We have accepted a donation that should bring the sims back online for now," she wrote in NWN comments yesterday, "as soon as some payment issues are settled." However, she adds, "the question remains of funding for the future, but we have some good feelings about that, too, with offers of help from several quarters." I've been talking with ISM volunteers, and my strong advice to them is that they create a crowdfunder, similar to the kind Bryn Oh launched to fund her SL art sim.

"You'll almost certainly raise more money than just asking people to anonymously donate to a PayPal address," I told them, "because then the fundraiser becomes a community event with a game-like goal to reach." Stay tuned for that (hopefully). Until then, adds Katherine, you can donate via PayPal to [email protected], or "leave L$ in the tipjar at Science School sim, or pay AyeEss Emms (the ISM's landowning alt account)."

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[Ignatius Onomatopoeia]

Since the creators own all the rights to the content, it would be relatively easy to export this amazing build to OpenSim.

I hope they make exporting the build their first goal, so this wonderful project can appear in a hygergrid-enabled grid. Given the potential of an export to Unity 3D or Jibe, that would also be a delightful way to reach a mass audience.

See you rocket jockeys on the other side, with other educators and gridnauts driven out by LL's overpriced product.

[shockwave yareach]

@Ignatius - that would be true if all the creators were still inworld anymore.

[Katherine W Prawl]

@Ignatius - Unfortunately, not all our builders (about 100 over the last six + years) have agreed to let us copy their creations to another grid. But, since most of our exhibits are replicas of RL objects, we can have them rebuilt with full perms for that purpose. It will take some time, but it's do-able.

Meanwhile, we are probably going to follow the advice to try a crowdfunding event, so if/when that happens you can read about it here. And many thanks again to Wagner for taking an interest in the museum, now and in the past.

[Metacam Oh]

Soon only Mitt Romney is going to be owning sims

[Masami Kuramoto]

Crowdfunding sims is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. We cannot save Second Life this way, but at least we can make its demise more dramatic. What I would like to see is a beauty contest of dying sims. For example, if your readers were given the choice between saving Bryn's art _or_ the ISM, which would they choose?

In the end, we'll all meet in OpenSim anyway. It's inevitable.

[Danielle]

There are becoming more options for 3D environments. For example the CryEngine Free SDK ( http://www.crydev.net/ ) would allow you to build the museum as a free game. E-on LumenRT ( http://www.lumenrt.com/download/#LiveCubes ) lets you create a real-time environments as a standalone package. Paying $295 a month for a sim is not a sustainable business in the long term as more of these options open up.

[Nanu]

i am sure nobody wants to hear that, but when they get a second chance its not enough anymore to just rezz the 2006 stuff. with sculpties and baked textures etc the possibilities and aesthetics have changed a lot in SL, and to stay relevant as a place to visit in SL one has to stay current. this will need a lot of skilled people, time and effort, to get to this level, not just a new sim.

[Wordfromthe Wise]

Linden Lab has a history of letting a lot of amazing builds just die. 'Pay or Die' that is their way to treat Builders or Artists.

Why crowdfunding a lot of money to pour it into
Linden Lab so they attract more users and earn more money to be just more snobbish ?

I agree with @Ignatius Onomatopoeia. Opensim would be the best way to go for the even by risking to have less visitors (which must be proved wrong or right) and if it is just to 'leave a message' to LL.

And i think somebody interested in that topic will be able to connect to a Opensim Grid like e.g. the OSGRID an visit the Museum there.

I would love to host the museum there for free and i think a lot of other people would be proud to do this as well.

best regards
Wordfromthe Wise

[Ignatius Onomatopoeia]

@Katherine, I had the problem of multiple-permissions when I transferred the build from our campus island to Jokaydia Grid.

So export what you can while staying in SL...for a while. Then tell LL where they can take their outrageous tier.

I found that what I created in OpenSim to be far superior, even with old-timey prims. For assistant builders, we never shared the same object, so we could export it to our hard drives and share the build off-world that way.

Good luck...but for any new content, I'd task a single builder to each object (well, you could have three for that Saturn V...one per stage :)

But come over to OpenSim...it's the best way to show Linden Lab that they overcharge for their services. I pay in a year, to Jokay, what we would have paid LL in a MONTH after they ended the 50% edu discount.

Their tier rates are robbery, plain and simple. Masami and others who said similar here are correct: the future for 3D immersive worlds is not SL, unless LL can cut tier. And we know they cannot do that.

So let's rocket off for a better world before the comet hits.

That said, I'll certainly contribute to the crowd-funding efforts. Your museum was popular with my students in 08 and 09.

[Breen Whitman]

@ Katherine "Meanwhile, we are probably going to follow the advice to try a crowdfunding event"

Why not step slightly out of the square on this one.

Rather than crowd-sourcing for money that puts you at square one(IE the SL tier ticks it away to nothing from day one), why not try crowd-sourcing for the building of it in Opensim.

The fact that its a museum of space exploration rockets is ironic. Did each person that went up do it for money, or to be a pioneer for humankind.

Opensim is the pioneering astronaut. SecondLife is the car salesperson.

[Pussycat Catnap]

What I said on another blog:

“has been such a landmark feature of Second Life”

Is it? Or was it?

These articles are the first I’d ever heard of it.
In fact, harsh though it may be to say – that’s been true for all of the ‘historic build is dying’ articles I’ve been seeing on various blogs over the past few months.

Yes tier is expensive and LLs has killed off all the normal means of supporting a sim…
- I point that out almost daily on the forums.

BUT, how important are all these historic builds if they’re largely invisible from blogs, search, events, classifieds, and so on? They seem to only get blogged about when dying. Bloggers have otherwise moved on to other ‘shinies.’

I would much rather see an SL full of places like this sim, than what I am seeing a lot of in SL lately – so I understand the desperation at the loss of places like this.

But, are we struggling to save an SL that was, or an SL that is?

[Ignatius Onomatopoeia]

We cannot save 'em all, Pussycat, but this one was a favorite of SL's battered and bloody educational community. Just mentioned it at a meeting and they all know of the ISM.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

Or put in other terms: McDonald's gets more visitors than the Louvre. That doesn't make it more significant.

[Katherine Prawl]

I'm loving the comments on this post! Thanks all of you for your thoughts, even when they seem somewhat opposed to our immediate goals. Restoring the ISM in SL is necessary regardless of whether we continue in SL or branch out into other grids, or both. I'm very grateful for the financial AND verbal support from the SL community, and for the ideas and offers of future support in other grids. It's something we have thought about literally for years, but had to put our energy into just surviving long enough to implement it. We also needed to wait for the technology to mature a bit and gain more widespread acceptance, since in the early days in OSGrid it was a bit pre-market for something like ISM. I played around with a sim there several years ago, and liked the idea as well as the freedom, but I wasn't able at that time to get the rest of the group to go along. That could change after our more recent experiences. So, stay tuned for our rebirth. Where ever it happens, it's bound to be interesting. And thanks again for all the support.

[rikomatic]

The Spaceflight Museum was one of the first spaces in SL to really ignite my imagination about the potential for virtual worlds for education and science. While OpenSim offers an interesting and cheaper alternative to Second Life, there's a ways to go before there is anything like the kinds of numbers and rech of SL.

A better option IMO would be a Unity web-based implementation that was accessible on tablets and slower machines, with links to a fuller virtual museum in SL. That way you could reach the thousands who deserve to see these exhibits and still have a sim that hundreds can access more fully in SL.

[remoteone]

I've been wondering if LL could divert funds which it gains through the taking of pictures in sims, to those sims? It seems to me that if builders have gone to the trouble of making a sim worth photographing and LL takes $10L every pic (surely not related to an actual data cost) then an appropriate reward would be some portion of those funds?

[Lani Global]

To Katherine -

It looks like you have a 30 day reprieve to get all your builders to export their works to XML files and also save the textures and scripts.

BACK UP FILES is what you should spend your efforts on, not crowdsourcing, if you want to really save it for the future. The Imprudence viewer XML file export has become the defacto standard, and it makes exports/imports easy.

Once all your builds are exported, you can do what you like with all these free and/or low cost methods:

1. External archive of the XMLs
2. Web archive of the XMLs
3. Opensimulator virtual world region (sim)
4. Opensimulator *.oar file (sim backup file)
5. Unity3d (conversion via Opensim *.oar file)
6. Upload it to another SL sim after they lower their tier co$t in the distant future :)
7. All of the above.

Don't waste any more time crowdsourcing if you really are serious about saving your sim.

Best Wishes,
Lani

[Stone Semyorka]

Katherine, stay in Second Life, rebuild, spend more time on promotion of ISM to the various publics who might give support.

The International Spaceflight Museum came from a vision of reaching out to people in large numbers to help them become aware of spaceflight and learn more about how it is accomplished.

The ideas expressed in many of these posts is to kick LL in the shins for being jerks toward our educational regions and attractive sims.

Those are two different visions for ISM. While moving to a different grid might satisfy the we'll-show-'em folks, the I'll-take-my-toys-and-go-home people, it will only defeat the original outreach mission.

Think of the vast amount of exposure ISM can achieve in SL vs. anywhere else suggested here. That broad contact with the public will help you reach your true mission of educational outreach.